The Believer’s service dog is an important part of our family; when the three of us are out on the town, people sometimes ask me when it’s appropriate to pet him. I tell them, first, that the key thing is to ask her permission before paying any attention to her dog. I then compare him to a dentist. If a dentist was drilling your teeth, you wouldn’t want someone to wander into the room and start rubbing your dentist’s head and shoulders, exclaiming “What a good dentist!” If you can understand why it would be wrong to do that, you should be able to understand why it is wrong to interrupt a service dog on the job.